Defector mocks former North Korean despot

ABOVE the ballooning dress of Marilyn Monroe is the face of the late North Korean despot Kim Jong-il.

A pigeon flies overhead and a feather lies nearby on the ground.

North Korean artist Song Byeok once proudly drew the “Dear Leader” in propaganda paintings. But he was sent to labour in one of the reclusive state’s notorious prisons after hunger forced him to try to flee.

Now a defector living in the South Korean capital, Seoul, Song has turned to mocking a ruler who led his country into famine, isolation and economicruin.

“The day I finished this, he passed away,” Song said of his painting and the death of Kim on December 17.

“He’s not an eternal creature but the same as the feather of a pigeon,” said Song, using the feather to symbolise something inconsequential.

“I thought it would’ve been better if he made North Koreans better off and forget hunger before he died.”

Kim, who was 69 when he died, was a patron of the arts in his hermit kingdom and at times went to extreme means to promote the arts.

He once kidnapped a film director and forced him to make movies for him.

Song never had a sitting with Kim, the second member of a dynasty that has ruled North Korea since its birth in 1948.

Song, 42, like most North Koreans, practically worshipped Kim and before that, his father, Kim Il-sung. But starvation, a result of chronic mismanagement and natural disasters, changed that. After floods in the late 1990s, conditions deteriorated to the point of desperation.

In August 2000, Song and his father, driven by hunger, tried to swim across the Tumen river to China. But his father was swept away and Song was caught and sent to a labour camp, the North Korean equivalent of the Soviet-era gulags where the human rights group Amnesty International says 200,000 citizens are forced to work with little food and under threat of execution.

In the freezing Korean winter, a finger on his right hand became infected and eventually, he says, he was so close to death that his captors could get no work out of him and released him.

But Song in 2002 made it and ended up in Seoul. After his mother died in 2005, he brought his sister and her family out in 2007.

Despite losing his finger, Song took up his brush again. Some of his paintings now show hollow-eyed North Korean girls and smiling, homeless children, known in the North as “fluttering swallows,” surrounding Kim.

As for Kim Jong-un, the 20-something son of Kim Jong-il, who will become the third member of the Kim dynasty to rule North Korea, Song says for now, he has no plan to paint him.